Maria Godoy

Amid the media phenomenon that is Cmdr. Chris Hadfield, you may have overlooked his turn as the International Space Station's top chef.

The Canadian astronaut, who landed back on Earth Monday along with two other ISS crew members, wasn't just hamming it up during his five months in space. (Although ...

All this week on The Salt and on Morning Edition, we've been exploring the stories behind your ritual cup of joe. On Friday afternoon, we held an NPR virtual coffeehouse to discuss. You can watch archived video of the first of what we hope will be a series of Google+ ...

Clovers? Hearts? That's small fries, guys. It's time you met The Cat:

That 3-D creation is the work of Japanese latte artist Kazuki Yamamoto. The 26-year-old resident of Osaka creates ephemeral works of art in espresso and foam.

From whimsical monsters crafted from milk froth ...

... to adorable homages ...

Most people would be hard-pressed to call Wal-Mart a source of artistic inspiration. A place to purchase peanut butter, cereal and other mundane necessities? Yes. But a rendezvous spot with transcendence? Hardly.

Yet that's exactly what artist Brendan O'Connell sees in the sprawling big-box stores. For the past decade, ...

Coachella, the massive outdoor music festival that kicks off this weekend in Indio, Calif., has become an "incubator" not just for new bands, but for rising food entrepreneurs, according to a story in the San Jose Mercury News earlier this week.

We here at The Salt couldn't help but ...

Apples and especially pears are vulnerable to a nasty bacterial infection called fire blight that, left unchecked, can spread quickly, killing fruit trees and sometimes devastating whole orchards.

"It's basically like a gangrene of your limbs. It's hard to stop" once it takes hold, says Ken Johnson, a plant ...

What is the essence of a life? Is it our career accomplishments? Our devotion to friends and family? Our secret little talents and foibles? Is it, perhaps, our killer recipe for beef stroganoff?

That question underlies a controversy burning up the Twitterverse in recent days over an obituary of ...

Tucked inside a short-term funding measure that Congress approved Thursday is a provision that critics are denouncing as a "Monsanto Protection Act."

The so-called "biotech rider" was included in legislation that won final approval from the House, avoiding a shutdown of the federal government on March 27, when ...

Nothing says party like pancakes and butter. At least, not if you happen to be in Russia this week.

The country is in the midst of celebrating Maslenitsa, an Eastern Slavic folk holiday that takes place the week before the start of Russian Orthodox Lent (this year, it starts March ...

As the white smoke cleared from the skies above the Vatican on Wednesday, one of the first widely reported personal tidbits to emerge about the newly selected pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, is that the Argentine cooks for himself. But the new pontiff, who will now be known as Francis, is ...

A New York state judge has knocked down New York City's landmark new ban on big, sugary drinks, just one day before it was set to take effect.

Calling them "arbitrary and capricious," state Supreme Court Justice Milton Tingling on Monday invalidated regulations that would have banned New York City ...

A swarm of locusts that has devastated crops in Egypt made its way into neighboring Israel this week. And with Passover just around the corner, many news outlets couldn't resist noting the shades of the biblical tale of Exodus, when the insects were one of 10 plagues that descended ...

Eat them whole or divide and conquer? That's the eternal question when it comes to Oreos, those little rounds of chocolate cookie hugging creme in the middle.

Over the years, the marketing folks at Nabisco have issued some well-known directions on how to enjoy their beloved processed cookies: You can ...

From the jungles of Southeast Asia through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the chicken's journey to the table has been quite the odyssey, spanning thousands of years. Yet it's ...

If you've ever watched the television show Downton Abbey, you've probably deduced that dining was a very, very big deal in the lives of the landed gentry of Edwardian England.

Much of the drama surrounding the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants unfolds against a tableau of the table.

...